Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

A few days ago, when I was about halfway through the book, I wondered aloud on Twitter whether Anna M. Grzymała-Busse’s Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State might need to join the mini-canon of Schmitt-style genealogical political theology. Having finished it, I now think it provides a key point of reference for a lot of projects in that strange field, though it is very much not in the “style” of the most influential works (of the kinds of works that I have advocated adding to the mini-canon, like Caliban and the Witch).

It is a sober empirical analysis, at times even a little boring, but it supplies something crucial: an actual concrete mechanism for the kind of “secularization of theological concepts” that are our stock in trade. In a way, Grzymała-Busse’s lack of conceptual or theological ambition is necessary for her to uncover what has been hiding in plain sight: state institutions in medieval Europe quite literally copied practices and procedures from papal models. The reasons for this are both grandiose and mundane — on the one hand, the papacy obvious carried with it a unique kind of spiritual authority, but on the other hand, the church was the only institution that looked like it knew what it was doing. For things like literacy, documentation, regular procedures, disputes based on precedent and evidence, etc., etc., the church was for many centuries the only game in town.

The motivation to adopt church models for governance grew out of the papacy’s temporal ambitions, which produced a rivalry with secular states. Continue reading “Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology” →

Hanging out

~ Adam Kotsko ~ Leave a comment

I must really be back in blogging mode, because I feel compelled to do that most bloggy of things — explain why I haven’t been blogging. My excuse is simple: I’ve been making great progress on my aforementioned book on Star Trek, which has left me very little energy for other writing. But I’ve been mulling a post on this topic since returning from my trip to the UK. The conference — at which I delivered my first official presentation on the Qur’an — was rewarding, and the trip My Esteemed Partner and I planned around it really hit the spot, with a more casual vibe in Edinburgh and a busy couple days in London. But what really stood out to me was how energized I was by simply hanging out with my academic friends. The combination of genuine friendship, shared intellectual interests, and — crucially — unstructured time was absolutely rejuvenating. We weren’t catching up over coffee in an appointment made months in advance, we were all simply there and available and up for conversation.

I italicize all these seemingly insignificant aspects of the situation just to highlight how bizarrely rare they tend to be in my life, and I assume most of our lives. Continue reading “Hanging out” →

Enemies for Your Sake: The Figure of the Jew in Paul and the Qur’an

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!]

In this paper, I want to draw a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. I will begin by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explain how I came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggest how the parallels might have come about. I will then develop a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion in which I draw out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.

Continue reading “Enemies for Your Sake: The Figure of the Jew in Paul and the Qur’an” →

The pandemic — which isn’t over, by the way!

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

Once in grad school, Anthony Paul Smith and I had the same temp job. It was a terrible job, doing tedious data entry to convert the Sunday circular coupons into a clickable webpage. Seldom has a temp job felt more purely pointless and degrading. And yet, a few months later, we caught ourselves fondly recalling those times, and Anthony suggested that we need to resist the urge to be nostalgic for something simply because it’s in the past.

I find myself thinking that about the pandemic lately. Continue reading “The pandemic — which isn’t over, by the way!” →

Why write about TV?

~ Adam Kotsko

I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.

I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.

I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Continue reading “Why write about TV?” →

Who is my neighbor?

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

In the wake of the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, a new meme has emerged on the right: the killer, Daniel Penny, was acting as a “Good Samaritan.” A more craven and blasphemous distortion of Jesus’s parable is hardly imaginable. In fact, I almost hesitate to dignify it with a response. Neely himself is so obviously the victimized party here, and if anything, his murder shows what happens when a “Good Samaritan” doesn’t show up. Moreover, the fact that the story a story that is so obviously about moral decency that crosses lines of ethnic enmity and distrust — the Jewish victim’s co-religionists pass him by, while a member of a hated, supposedly half-breed sect provides generous help — can be deployed to apply to a member of a privileged in-group using lethal violence against a multiply marginalized person displays the kind of willful, spiteful ignorance that only committed racists can pull off.

This isn’t the first time the story has been misunderstood. There are numerous accounts of preachers crafting a contemporary version of the parable where a priest and a deacon pass the victim by, while an atheist (or an illegal immigrant, or a trans person, or whoever else) generously helps. The punchline is always that the parishoners — who have presumably known this story all their lives — inevitably find this retelling offensive and insulting.

Continue reading “Who is my neighbor?” →

What I’ve learned

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 3 Comments

On Monday I submitted grades, and this afternoon I reviewed my teaching evaluations. That closes the books on my 14th year as a college professor. I am currently 42 years old, so by my math, I have been doing this for roughly one-third of my life. That is strange to think about! I’ve been a higher ed teacher for longer than I myself was in higher ed, and longer than I was in public schools. Over the next couple years, I will be going through a major evaluation, so I’m in a reflective mood. Obviously the way I’ve chosen to live my life indicates that learning is very important to me. What have I learned?

Other than a two-year period as visiting faculty at Kalamazoo College, my entire teaching career has been spent as part of the Shimer Great Books program, first at the independent school in Chicago and subsequently at North Central College. As I’ve written many times before, that program has a very distinctive ethos. All of our courses are discussion-based seminars based on important primary sources — no textbooks, no lectures, no high-stakes in-class exams. Since joining North Central I have been called upon to teach outside the Shimer program and have needed to fold lecture-based pedagogy back into some courses, but the discussion model remains my center of gravity. My goal is always, somehow, to get as close as I can to the day where my students can sit in a circle and talk open-endedly about what they’ve read.

This consistent pedagogical training has had a huge impact on me as a person. Continue reading “What I’ve learned” →

Summer plans

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

My last post feels like a lifetime ago, along with the positive hopeful attitude it reflects. The end of the the semester is always a sprint, but it has become much moreso now that I have taken on a faculty governance role that entails participation in faculty meetings and Board meetings. I feel drained, exhausted, and irritable. But soon it will be over, and I will be able to experience my first “normal” summer in many years — uninterrupted stretches of time to devote to activities primarily of my own choosing. Between the pandemic, buying a house, and then doing a ton of travel, this hasn’t happened in a while. Other than the pandemic, all of those things were net positives for my life, yet they didn’t represent the kind of recharge and regroup I’ve thought of as a normal part of my annual routine.

Continue reading “Summer plans” →

Nature is healing: Reports from a self-imposed sabbatical

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 2 Comments

As long-time readers know, about a year ago, I declared a self-imposed sabbatical from all academic work that wasn’t directly required by my job. While I created a carve-out for invited lectures, I announced that I would say no to an invited contributions to journals or edited volumes, any op-ed writing, and (especially!) any peer reviews. My only writing outlet would be the blog, which I hoped would help reconnect me to the fun of writing again.

I think it — worked? Continue reading “Nature is healing: Reports from a self-imposed sabbatical” →

Some rambling reflections on truth and violence

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 9 Comments

I have never advocated political violence in any published writing or in any talk. You can read the talk I posted yesterday, for instance, and you will find no recommendation of left-wing political violence, indeed no mention of that possibility. Yet it inevitably happens, in Q&A sessions, that the topic comes up. The way it generally unfolds is that my listeners or readers observe that I make the following claims: the existing political system lacks democratic legitimacy; those in a position to wield institutional power are unresponsive to popular demands; and both major parties fully support police violence, with the Republicans growing ever more tolerant and even encouraging of vigilante violence. Hence, in order to reach the kind of goals I lay out, it seems like some form of political violence would be inevitable. So am I advocating political violence?

I personally do not intend to commit any political violence, nor would I encourage anyone else to do so. I’m at a loss, though, for why anyone considering such a thing would view me as an appropriate confidant or mentor. I am far from an activist. My praxis is objectively that of a middle-class liberal intellectual, and even on the level of individual choices and the various virtue-signals one tends to send, I am not particularly left-coded (e.g., I’m not a vegetarian or vegan).

In fact, I don’t want to be advocating anything at all — I want to undertake a purely analytic and diagnostic project. The problem is that contemporary academic culture will not allow me to do that. Continue reading “Some rambling reflections on truth and violence” →